"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Fortunately, tools and methods for keyword discovery and analysis have advanced as well. How can you maximize the value of Google’s “dumbed down” Keyword Planner tool? What other tools and resources are most valuable for keyword research? How can you use keyword research results more strategically?

Find those answers and more here in a handful of the best expert SEO keyword research guides of the past year.

Google’s decisions to hide referring keywords from organic search and to replace its Keyword Research tool with the dumbed-down Keyword Planner have made keyword research more challenging. But Samantha Winchell here recommends 10 helpful alternative paths to finding the best keyword phrases for optimization, from the keywords associated with your most popular blog posts to online industry forums.

Confused by Google’s new “lite” keyword research tool? Ian Cleary helpfully explains how Google’s new Keyword Planner tool works, how to access it, the differences between the new tool and more-robust-but-now-discontinued Keyword Research tool, and the three options for performing keyword research with the new tool.

This detailed and excellent primer on keyword research steps through why keyword research is vital, how to identify the most promising keywords for your site, how to use the Google Keyword Research tool (now defunct, so see Ian’s article above on how to use the Keyword Planner tool instead), and the pros and cons of 10 alternative keyword research tools.

The brilliant and prolific Ann Smarty shows how to use the Google Suggest keyword research tool, expanding each phrase to the second and third levels to produce a huge list of actual organic keyword phrases, not skewed toward commercial searches.

Mike Murray lists a dozen questions to ask when conducting keyword research in support of content marketing efforts, from “Have I mined keyword research resources?” (beyond Google and other obvious tools) to “How will this keyword phrase choice fit into future content?” (strategically planning ahead for future content, not just immediate projects).